When you study Russian in Moscow with the American Council of Teachers of Russian, as I did fifteen summers ago, you go well beyond the typical tourist package. One of our many excursions was to the artist colony Peredelkino, a wooded village a half-hour southwest of the capital.

The dacha complex was founded on the impetus of Maxim Gorky, and its famous residents have included:

Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago

Isaac Babel, a giant of Russian Jewish prose, known for his Odessa Tales

Ilya Ilf, of the Ilf & Petrov duo, famous for humorous stories like The Twelve Chairs, made into a 1970 Mel Brooks film

poets Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

singer-songwriter-poet Bulat Akudzhava

It has seen its tragedies: Babel was arrested at his home there before being executed during Stalin’s purges.

Pasternak died there in 1960 after being hounded by a vicious, state-orchestrated media campaign against Doctor Zhivago for its criticism of Leninism and Stalinism. He was forced to decline the 1958 Nobel Prize for the work, but the committee insisted on awarding it in absentia. Authorities tried to keep his funeral a secret, but hundreds of his admirers showed up to recite his poetry at the grave site.

When you're in Moscow for six weeks, as I was in summer 2001, it's pleasant to get out to the countryside. Anton Chekhov also thought it was a good idea, so he bought the estate of Melikhovo, forty miles south of the metropolis, in 1892.

He had a small cottage built for guests, and it was there that he wrote The Seagull and completed another play, Uncle Vanya. He also planted very diverse vegetable and flower gardens with the help of his sister Maria.

The property is today a museum, with everything restored or rebuilt. A day-trip from Moscow can be combined with a visit to a monastery in the area. My gracious Moscow host mother, Sveta, along with family, took me there as part of a weekend trip to their dacha. Things are not as neatly mowed, trimmed and painted as in - well, of course - Germany, but sometimes the natural look grows on you.

I've devoted several entries to locales associated with Russian literature (links below), such as the Crime and Punishment Tour, and here's another. About two hours south of Moscow is the main residence of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. In many ways, the property of his life, particularly his post-"conversion"/proto-hippy later years. These pics were taken during a 2001 summer program at Moscow State University.

I mentioned the Yasnaya Polyana estate & Tolstoy's great-granddaughter in this post from last July. It's about a 36-hour online reading of Anna Karenina, with participants from Russia, the U.S., South Korea, and elsewhere, and a later Chekhov marathon. Look for an entry on one of Chekhov's residences next week.

I was blessed to hear Elie Wiesel speak at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1995. I cannot add anything else significant to the outpouring of tributes paid in recent days. So I’m simply posting a link to a text of his address that day and one to my post of twenty years later.